Sarah Wilson Every week heralds some new study about what makes us happy. I always like the money ones. We all rather love to hear that having a lot of money doesn’t bring happiness. Thank the Lord, hey! Those poor rich suckers…barkin’ up the wrong tree, aren’t they!?
But what do you make of this new Princeton University study that shows that earning around $75,000 a year makes us most happy?
I came across this post this morning by an Australian woman (her blog, Inspiration and Chai) who worked in palliative care. She’d chat to dying people about their regrets. Now she’s put together a list of the most common ones she’d come across.
It’s amazing how they’re really just the “regrets of the living”. I regret often that I’m not living to these principles. I’m conscious that working too hard and not choosing the happy choices is not “what life is meant to be about”. But somehow I think there’ll be time for that later…But, of course, habits form, days go by where you don’t stand back and have a good look at your life, and soon enough you’re 75.
My big mantra right now is: this isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is the real thing, there’s no run-up. You simply have to choose now to live out the things you fear you’ll regret. You choose to work less. You choose the happy option. No bones about it. And, besides, why bloody not?? I mean, really??
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
Sometimes health needs to be explained in nonsensical, onomatopoeic language. Yuk! Goob! Stodge! If you’ve been unwell for a while, or get gut aches for no discernible reason (and you’re told you’ve got IBS), or you go around in circles with complaints, or if you have some sort of auto-immune disease, then you totally know what I mean. Health, once you’ve gone past the level of taking a pill or getting a cast put on a broken leg, is nebular.
Or fuzzy.
Melbourne naturapath Gill Stannard alerted me to this youtube link with Gil Hedley talking about The Fuzz, a case for stretching in the morning. Totally pervy and visceral. And totally geared at anyone with inflammation issues (hello, auto-immune disease!!!).
This much you need to know: if you have inflammation issues, stretch in the morning, get massages, move.
Other ways to deal with inflammation:
1. Avoid processed foods – trans-fats, high-fructose corn syrup, chemicals, additives and other “non-food” ingredients. Sugar is highly inflammatory.
2. Eat healthy fats such as extra-virgin olive oil, coconut, avocados, nuts and seeds.
3. If you drink alcohol – an occasional glass of red wine is best.
4. Eat coloured vegetables and fruit. Eat more veggies than fruit (5-6 servings of veggies, 3-4 servings of fruit).
5. Only eat non-gluten grains – quinoa, amaranth and brown rice.
6. Eat turmeric. Here’s why.
This is really really cool. Last week Arcade Fire, Google and artist Chris Milk, launched “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video set to the band’s melancholy track “We Used to Wait.” Basically you type in the address of the home you grew up in and then it uses Google Maps and Google Street View to mix images of your childhood house into the video. Below is an image from my childhood home. We did actually have a house, but it was in a constant state of being built. In the meantime, we spent a lot of time sitting in dirt.
It also gets you to write a letter to your younger self, which is integrated into the clip, too.
It’s all a bit nerdy and is mostly about showcasing Google Chrome (which you download …free) and HTML5. Pundits are saying it’s The Future (man!) of music videos.
Whatever. I like the nostalgic nudge it provides.
The lyrics of the song that forms the soundtrack go like this:
This week I give away stuff… randomly.
Have you been ROAK’d yet? I know four people who have in the past fortnight. My friend Kerrie was walking to the servo to buy toilet paper and a woman she didn’t know handed her a bunch of jonquils. Just like that. A reader on my blog wrote to tell me some guy in front of her in the cafe queue paid for her coffee last week. Another two had their parking meter topped up by a stranger. In all but one case, they were handed a little note or card that informed them they were recipients of a Random Act of Kindness and that encouraged them to do the same to someone else. To pay it forward.
Americans are all over this odd little practice of guerilla dumping niceness on random strangers. Oprah has her Kindness Chain project. Her fans are invited to do a kind deed and write it down in a little journal that has their name and address on it and a request for the journal to be returned when full. They then invite the receiver of their RAOK to pass on the love – and the journal – to others.
In Line Behind Me is a Washington-based blog dedicated to people who’ve been shouted coffees by strangers. They’re slipped a card inviting them to post a heart-warming story about the RAOK on said blog. The “shouter” can then log on and read about their amazing altruism the next day. Which, I suppose, means it’s really a blog dedicated to people who want to read about themselves on blogs.
I’m in Bali on holidays… So I’m posting in advance a short best-of series. I hope you don’t mind. But it’s really something I need to practice, since I preach this kind of thing (shutting off, creating space), right? Part three is mini-list of the tricks and tips that have grabbed people the most. It’s … Read more
So, this week I’ve packed up and racked off to Bali for “annual leave” (are such things relevant when you work for yourself?). I’ve vowed not to work. So I’m posting in advance a short best-of series. I’ve been on this experiment…trying different tricks and meeting various gurus for just over a year. Some work. … Read more
So, this week I’ve packed up and racked off to Bali for “annual leave”. I’m here with four boys – Jim, Sam, Jason and Karl (a little more handsome than the lot below). Boys are funny on holidays. They arrive at consensus in crazy cruisy ways. All cool, so long as they get a surf in.
Anyway. So I’m posting in advance a short best-of series. I’ve been on this experiment…trying different tricks and meeting various gurus for just over a year. Which have worked? I’ve narrowed my take down to a mini-list of three.
It’s also the first day of Spring. Sniff some wattle for me!
1. Marketing guru Seth Godin. We chatted about giving art as a gift. The guy is very much the real deal. There are a lot of efficiency experts out there who preach only answering emails once a day and who – magically – reply to your correspondence within 5 seconds…. It kind of shits me. Or makes me have a little heart sink.
So how do we start giving gifts? How do we become remarkable? “The aim is to elevate connecting and sharing to the same level as breathing or eating lunch every day,” he says. By which he means, we start giving and then give some more and eventually it becomes a way of life. Seth walks his talk. He makes money from public speaking and his books. Then he spends the rest of his time giving freely. He intentionally doesn’t monetise his blog or any online webinars he gives and he expends a lot of energy connecting and helping people. I can vouch for this personally. Read more here.
2. The Dalai Lama. Yep, met the guy and chatted about how to stop head chatter. He’s a man true to brief. But who has the common touch. He knows how to tell the Western world what they need to hear.
Everyone has got a little excited about kale. Every time I write about it I get stacks of emails. So I thought I’d post a great kale pesto recipe. Healthy as. And you can freeze it...which I’m radically into right now.
There’s a lot of recipes out there. I like this one.
1 bunch kale
2 Tbsp hemp oil
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
2 Tbsp fresh basil
1 lemon, juiced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp Celtic sea salt
Add the ingredients to a food processor and whip with an S-Blade until finely chopped.
This one for quinoa with walnut kale pesto from glutenfree girl also looks good.
I love patterns. I get a kick out of arranging the accouterments on a cafe table (sugar dispenser, fork, napkin) in lovely stabilising shapes. I’m not a neat freak. I just like patterns and seeing if things can be placed more pleasingly. Which is why I whooped when I found things organized neatly.
It simply posts pics of things placed “just so”. It’s a delightful human quirk…this need to order things artfully. And I like how certain things appeal to us more…like having a thicker border at the BOTTOM of a painting than at the top.
I like arranging rolled up sugar packets and beer labels in patterns on bar tables. You?
